Sandy Hook was the last straw for me. That's the point where I just flat out stopped pretending there's any reason to give consideration to the pro-gun rhetoric of the under-educated, trigger-happy degenerates who act like any regulation on guns is a far more violent injustice than a five year-old's head splattered open like a melon with a featured role on Gallagher's comeback tour.
(Gory? Of course it is. I think our only chance of escaping this nightmare is to not ignore the horror. Reduce these victims to a statistic and you dehumanize what was done to them. Think of them as people whose insides ended up on their outside and you'll never look at a gun defender the same way again.)
If you're inclined to argue with me, you're wasting your time, particularly with the same talking points peddled by scum like Fox News, Alex Jones and Rush Limbaugh:
"Criminals don't care about laws so gun laws wouldn't solve anything." Yeah, and laws against homicide don't do a thing to stop the thousands of people to take the lives of others so let's just stop regulating murder too. And fuck you.
"Guns don't kill people. People kill people. People can kill with knives and cars too. Do you want to outlaw them?" Show me the knife capable of cutting 600 people in five minutes from a few under yards away and I'd demand it be outlawed to. And fuck you.
"SECOND AMENDMENT!!!!!!" ...calls for a "well-regulated militia." So let's compromise and regulate gun ownership so much that you can't buy a starter's pistol without a five-day waiting period and a DNA sample.
And fuck you.
"Now is not the time to have the conversa--" Fuck off and die.
Columbine should have been the end of this. Virginia Tech should have been the end of this. Some degenerate shooting up a pre-school SHOULD HAVE BEEN THE END OF THIS. And every time we get the same bullshit talking points, fueled by a racist xenophobic hate group that gets to call itself a political party, and who scares their base into voting against their own economic interests every time with "They're gonna come to take your guns!"
We can't reason with these people. And it's time to stop pretending that there's any value in being the reasonable adults in the room. They've thrived not because of any adherence to legislature, or facts, or studies. It's pure emotion, pure rage.
Gun enthusiasts are creatures of ID, not intelligence. You don't find a middle ground with them. The slaughter at Sandy Hook should have been an appeal to the emotions of even the most ardent gun supporters. So how did they react? They embraced the claims of a nutcase who argued the entire thing was a staged false flag. "More lies the libtards tell so they can take your guns!"
Bill O'Reilly called these mass shootings "the price of freedom," as if the needless deaths of hundreds is acceptable collateral damage that deserves not even a conversation about changing our ways. Mind you, this lover of freedom was incensed by expressions of the First Amendment when football players PEACEFULLY protested racial injustice. Maybe they should have taken out a couple toddlers. That seems to be what it takes to get a conservative behind a constitutional right.
So let's stop acting like these nuts can in any way be part of the solution. They won't be. We'll only solve this problem when we're strong enough to do this without them.
And make no mistake. The only solution IS taking all of the guns. There are international studies that show strong gun regulations have had a massive impact on the number of gun deaths. Banning automatic weapons, implementing a background check system, and requiring permits are all things that definitely work.
18 years ago, Law & Order took on the topic of gun control in an episode called "Gunshow." Jack McCoy attempts to prosecute a gun manufacturer for selling a gun that they knew was desirable for its vulnerability to being tampered with to make the firearm fully automatic. It's one of the best closing arguments in the history of the series.
I thought of that scene a lot yesterday when I heard about how the Las Vegas shooter was able to to hit nearly 600 people in a matter of minutes. What I wrote above is pure emotion. Without apologies. If it upsets you, good. It should. What Jack does below is a masterful presentation of how grotesque these weapons are, and what an abomination it is to defend their existence over the lives of the people they injure and kill.
Law & Order "Gunshow" (Jack McCoy's Summation & the Verdict) from Law and Order Diehards on Vimeo.
Ok. So who rounds up all the guns? Average citizens? Cops? The military? Are you calling for another Civil War? (You wouldn't be the first.) But you want to talk about death, carnage and millions of innocents killed. Or would everyone just drop them off at a fire station? It's good to have strong opinions, be passionate about a cause and want to live in peace. Still waiting for someone, anyone to come up with a solid plan to implement. I don't like guns. Hate 'em in fact. But I just think they're here to stay.
ReplyDeleteFirst rule of the gun control discussion. Don't engage the "round up all the guns" talking point. It's how conservatives want to frame it, to paint a picture that sounds both logistically impossible and an invasion of freedom. Then they can turn around and say, "It's impossible to get them all, so therefore we should do nothing!"
DeleteLook to Australia's common sense solution, expressed in this article. I found this paragraph particularly intriguing:
"Polling at the time of Australia’s law reforms indicated that 90% of Australians wanted serious changes introduced. [Note: that's pretty consistent with US levels post-Sandy Hook.] Our National Rifle Association-equivalent gun lobby could only fire political blanks at this. The ban saw a time-limited income tax levy imposed to enable the market price buyback of some 750,000 now banned weapons. Self-defense was also declared an unacceptable reason for purchasing any gun, with all licensed shooters thenceforth needing affiliation with a sports shooting club or authorization from land owners to hunt."
You saw all the blood right, from the 11,000 private cellphones recording the mayhem? You saw that girl get her head blown off by the bullet, right? Oh you only HEARD about it? Well, well.
ReplyDelete